The new A24 folk-horror film Men, currently playing in theaters, is creepy as hell for the first hour, and then some. But then it gets so grotesquely wacky at the end that you may have a similar reaction to its heroine — she gets a blank, just slightly disgusted look on her face, walks away, and shuts the door behind her.

Still, it’s no easy thing doing genuinely scary horror, and Alex Garland — writer-director of Ex Machina (2015), Annihilation (2018), and Devs (2020), and before that, screenwriter of The Beach (2000) and 28 Days Later (2002) — has managed it for a solid hour, at least. The film is so nerve-racking in certain sequences that I regretted seeing it alone at night. To add to the intense uneasiness of the experience, for some reason I was the only woman in the theater with a few dozen men, a scenario with uncomfortable resonance given the plot of the movie.

The frame story involves the breakup of Harper (Jessie Buckley) and her husband James (Paapa Essiedu), who refuses to accept her statement that she wants a divorce. He threatens to kill himself. Their final encounter — which ends after he hits her and she throws him out — occurs during a sunset that turns the entire apartment an acid shade of fiery orange. She’s standing there in the same hellish light, nose bloody, when she sees her husband’s body drop down past her window.